‘The Word Exchange,’ by Alena Graedon

By LIESL SCHILLINGER

May 2, 2014

Earlier this year, one of those BuzzFeed quizzes that tempt the idle with spurious but irresistible personality tests asked web surfers to click a box to identify their worst fear, choosing among nine popular forms of dread. Many of the choices in the Fear category were unsurprising — Failure, Cancer, Dying Alone — but one stood apart: Suddenly Becoming Stupid. Who would have thought, in this age of gung-ho, market-driven anti-intellectualism, that anxiety about fading brainpower was sufficiently potent and widespread to go viral? Who knew it was even, as millennials say, a thing?

In Alena Graedon’s first novel, “The Word Exchange,” a nervy, nerdy dystopic thriller set in New York City in the very near future, the risk of “suddenly becoming stupid” is not notional, it’s actual. A highly contagious, sometimes fatal virus called “word flu” has leapt from computers to their users, corrupting not only written language but also spoken words with gibberish and scaring the “pask” out of infected netizens.

If you’ve ever received an indecipherable text message, you know the frustration of having language utterly fail to communicate. Now imagine that this nonsense issues from your own lips. Luckily, not everyone is equally vulnerable to the virus. Polyglots and brainy throwbacks who read books on paper and keep journals have some resistance, but the cyber-reliant legions who read only “limns” on screens (i.e., most people) make easy targets.

In Graedon’s tomorrow-world, the web has invaded human life even more aggressively than it has today. Hand-held devices called “Memes” are so attuned to owners’ habits and tastes that they have nearly psychic powers (deciding what their hosts should order at restaurants, hailing a cab unbidden), and they discreetly flash the definitions of “obscure” words whose precise meanings their under-read owners have forgotten, like “ambivalent” and “cynical.” The newest variety of Meme, the Nautilus, doesn’t even need a screen. It sticks to the skin like a glinting silver leech, beaming digital information directly into the user’s neural pathways and mining them for data.

For a while, the afflicted don’t realize they’re sick. Accustomed to inexact language, they don’t notice when opportunistic cyberfiends from the evil consortium Synchronic, Inc., buy up the rights to every word in the dictionary and start transmitting phony neologisms into Memes, minds and mouths. What’s in it for Synchronic? Well, the linguistic profiteers (correctly) anticipate that the human compulsion to understand and to be understood is so overpowering that once incomprehensible coinages (like “vzung” “eezow,” “jeedu” and “naypek,” to name a few) start popping up on their devices and on their tongues, Meme users will pay 25 cents per word to have the nonsense-ologisms instantaneously defined. By monetizing the impulse to verbal laziness, the speculators stand to make billions. Or rather they do until their client base succumbs to the unforeseen babble pandemic. Who can rescue the world from this plague of idiocy?

Clever, breathless and sportively Hegelian in theme (the book has three sections — Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis), “The Word Exchange” combines the jaunty energy of youngish adult fiction (boyfriend trouble, parent conflicts, peer pressure and post-collegiate jitters) with the spine-tingling chill of the science-­fiction conspiracy genre. Graedon’s 27-year-old heroine, Anana Johnson, is the loving, impulsive, creative but “relatively average” daughter of the “genius” lexicographer Douglas Samuel Johnson, longtime editor of the North American Dictionary of the English Language (NADEL). As the novel begins, Dr. Johnson has gone missing, and foul play seems very likely. Anana (named for her father’s favorite fruit, the pineapple — ananas in French) worries terribly about Doug (as she calls her father), but troubles of her own slow her sleuthing — like her breakup with selfish Max, a ­cybergenius with murky ties to Synchronic, or the confusing attentions she’s getting from her father’s deputy at NADEL, a bookish young etymologist named Bart. And then there’s the awkward Thanksgiving holiday she must spend with her mother, Vera, and Vera’s pompous new boyfriend, Laird. Moreover, Anana is starting to talk kind of funny.

Can she dodge the thugs of the Synchronic mafia and uncover the secret behind her father’s disappearance before the language virus incapacitates her? Members of the Diachronic Society, an underground band of word purists loyal to Dr. Johnson (yes, Doug and the Diachronic disciples are well aware of his renowned forerunner), certainly hope so, but they have their doubts about Anana’s suitability as an avenger, despite her impressive judo skills. For one thing, unlike her erudite parent, she’s “addicted to Meme”; for another, “Clues must be v. obvious in order for her to find them.” Nonetheless they concede that Anana is “highly motivated” to find Doug, as well as “pretty enough to receive slightly preferential treatment,” though “not so pretty as to stand out in a crowd.” Flawed or not, she will have to do.

In the manner of most heroines who find favor with broad audiences, Graedon’s Anana is brave but not terribly perceptive. The author has taken care to make her character suspensefully benighted — and to keep her that way. As the lexicographer’s daughter stumbles from one dangerous encounter to another, the reader endures continual waves of panic, like a spectator at a slasher film watching through louvered fingers as the victim-to-be answers the phone, climbs into the dark attic or walks toward a car in an abandoned lot.

Should Anana descend into the sub-basement of her father’s office building after hours to find out what’s causing that burning smell and those alarming thuds? Is it wise for her to linger alone in her apartment right after it’s been ransacked? Would a prudent person unbolt the door when a demented, raving visitor rings the bell? Again and again, you want to shout, “Don’t do it!” Graedon makes you wring your hands for her heroine — and tremble for the future of the English language throughout her 26 chapters, achieving the singular feat of turning the alphabet into a cliffhanger.

As much fun as Graedon has with her Borgesian doomsday scenario, her novel folds serious meditations on language and society into its manhunt. The story is carried forward in alternating first-person accounts by Anana and by the besotted etymologist Bart, who struggles to decode his feelings for Anana and collate his philosophical and philological pensées, some of which originate from Anana’s father’s sage pronouncements. Sharing this trove of word-forged associations and impressions may be, he believes, “the only means for linking consciousnesses,” and thereby the only path to love. But can the wordsmith woo his lady when, despite his ability to read eight languages and regardless of the fact that he has devoured libraries of hard-bound volumes, words like “zhaman,” “krishka,” “pinshee” and “shirsom” begin to infest his speech? Can he overcome the viral rush of stupidity that assails him? And, by the way, what has become of the good Dr. Johnson? At a time when a lapsus linguae can be as deadly as a knife in the back, it’s hardly surprising that he’s in no rush to come to the phone.